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  • #2095752

    Implications of a Mac

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    by nhughes79 ·

    Our company is thinking of purchasing a Mac for design purposes. With this in mind i wondered if anyone could give me some advise surrounding the implications of this:
    We have a Netware Networking system, do we need to obtain the ‘Prosoft’ client in order for the Mac to be integrated into our PC network?
    Zip drive. Do all Mac come with Zip drives INSTEAD of floppy’s?
    If we need to install a floppy, can the disks we use on the Mac, be used in our current PC’s?
    How does the OS of the mac (eg OS4)impact with Novell Netware?

    Any advise would be gratefully received
    Kind Regards
    Neil Hughes

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    • #3837180

      Implications of a Mac

      by knye ·

      In reply to Implications of a Mac

      We are a school district, with eleven Netware servers among five buildings and a 60/40 Mac/PC environment of about 600 workstations. We are running NW 4.11 on two servers, 5.0 on eight and 5.1 on one.
      We chose not to use Prosoft’s client; you can access your network through the MacOS’ Chooser. Not all Macs come with Zip drives, but most G3’s and up do. I am fairly sure that there is room to install an internal Zip on all G3 and G4s. No current models of Macs come with floppy drives built in; we encourage our staff and students to go ‘diskless’. We found too many viruses being passed around with floppies and they just aren’t reliable. Of course there are many that still choose to use them; for those we have purchased third party USB exterrnal floppy drives. The hot swappable feature is especially helpful! And yes, PC disks can be read and formatted in the Macs going back as far as PowerPC Macs. Interchanging files between Macs and PC versions of software is also a breeze.
      As for OSversions, our workstations vary greatly from OS 7.6.1 all the way up to 9.0.4, all connecting to Netware. Mac files, including installers, are stored with no problems on the Netware servers. Files can be transferred between Macs and PCs without loss of data integrity as well.
      There is an excellent site devoted to the integration of Macs and PCs, macwindows.com, that I would reccommend.
      HTH!
      Kelly Nye
      Jamesville DeWitt Central School District
      New York, USA

    • #3835618

      Implications of a Mac

      by wlbowers ·

      In reply to Implications of a Mac

      Answer #1 said most of it. Just to fill in the blanks. There is a software to put on the windows machines that will let you mount and format Mac floppies. You can then transfer txt, and graphic files that way.

      The Mac is an excellent choice for Design. You can not beat a Mac with Adobe products. When you buy get as much memory as you can afford. Photoshop is a dream when you can allocate 400meg to it.

      Good Luck Lee

    • #3857984

      Implications of a Mac

      by david.blaikie ·

      In reply to Implications of a Mac

      Not all MACS come with Zip drives but adding an external SCSI / USB zip is cheap + easy + reliable. On the Mac the option (in your situation) is to format the disks as MSDOS format – thus the disk works transparently with the Mac OS or Windows OS. Installing from floppy means creating a “floppy disk image” (a virtual Floppy).
      Good luck the learning curve will be worth it
      David

    • #3669273

      Implications of a Mac

      by beeba ·

      In reply to Implications of a Mac

      Note also that fonts on pc’s and mac’s are not identical, even if they’re supposed to be. So if you have a document created on a pc which you transfer, it may not look 100% like the original.

    • #3697346

      Implications of a Mac

      by nhughes79 ·

      In reply to Implications of a Mac

      This question was closed by the author

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